Kristin Berkery

Kristin is a freelance graphic designer and writer in Sacramento, California, with a life-long passion for horses. She designs websites and marketing materials for businesses. In her spare time she's active with her daughter and son. See Kristin's online portfolio and LinkedIn profile.

Want to write for ilovehorses.net? The site typically gets 5,000 to 10,000 visitors a month, so it’s a good opportunity for you to establish a writing portfolio and promote your horse-related business.

I’m taking a break from researching and writing new content for ilovehorses.net because I’m working on some exciting marketing and social media projects. I’ll still post photos and interesting news on Facebook and occasionally I’ll pin new images on Pinterest. When things are a little less busy, I’ll develop new articles for the site.

If you’d like to write for ilovehorses.net, please email me at kristin @ ilovehorses.net and share your ideas. The site typically gets 5,000 to 10,000 visitors a month, so it’s a good opportunity for you to establish a writing portfolio and promote your horse-related business. I’m looking for articles that

Kristin

Keith Templeton edits The Farrier Guideto education and employment, a resource for farriers that features a worldwide directory of horseshoeing schools, informative guides to finding the right school and working as a farrier as well as interviews with experienced farriers.

Photo by Paulina Kozlowska

With more than 25 years of experience horseshoeing, teaching, and riding, Bryan Farcus educates horse owners around the country through regular hoof care demonstrations and horse clinics. The Farrier Guide caught up with Farcus to ask him about the basics of hoof care and how horses and owners benefit from the services of a farrier.

What does a farrier do?
Today’s farrier is not necessarily your granddaddy’s blacksmith. One main reason for this is that the use of our modern day horses is one of recreation, rather than one of work. Back in the day, to shoe a horse meant that you had to produce many of the tools and shoes used from scratch. To be a farrier (shoer of the horse), you had to also be a metal/iron working specialist.(more…)

I found a pretty cool word or tag cloud tool online: Tagxedo.com. It crawls your site, Twitter account, or other web content and finds the most common words, making the popular words bigger, and then arranges them in an image. Here’s ilovehorses.net‘s word cloud at left. At Tagxedo’s Twitter feed you can find links to all kinds of creative word cloud images they’ve made.

Can you see the ilovehorses.net logo? I think it’s pretty cool. Make your own image-shaped word cloud at Tagxedo.

A farrier is a specialist who cares for horse’s feet and smiths horseshoes. The term “farrier” comes from the Latin word “ferrarius,” which means “of iron” or “blacksmith.” The etymology of the word explains why farriers are confused for blacksmiths, which they are not. Centuries ago, the village blacksmith would make items out of iron, including horseshoes, and because workers were not as specialized as they are today, the blacksmiths would also be the ones to apply those shoes to the horses.(more…)

More than simply the biography of an unusual sideshow act, Beautiful Jim Key by Mim Eichler Rivas takes a thorough look at American history from before the Civil War to the mid-20th century, examining race relations, World’s Fair and exposition history, and the development of the humane movement. The story centers around the “Arabian-Hambletonian educated horse” Beautiful Jim Key, his breeder William Key, who was a business-savvy former slave, and their promoter, Albert Rogers, a privileged young New Yorker who aspired to being a philanthropist.

A VIP pass to one of Beautiful Jim Key’s performances at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. From Beautiful Jim Key by Mim Eichler Rivas